Lawmakers Find $21 a Week Doesn't Buy a Lot of Groceries

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by OneTimeSBX

kevin, kevin, kevin...
not everyone on food stamps has no job/has 18 kids/lives in the ghetto/is mooching off the system.

It does happen though.

a lot of elderly people get food stamps. should they be allotted only a "minimum"?

I'm assuming that they're going to use that food stamp money in conjunction with their social security benefits. So yeah, the minimum works for me. For anything above poverty, it's their responsibility to save for retirement, not mine to pay for it.

i worked as a teller for 2 years, and there were elderly getting social security checks for 500 bucks a month...you tell me where in the US you can live off of that!

Again, not my problem. Also, clearly, the elderly you were dealing with were living somewhere and not starving to death.

people who are laid off of very well paying jobs find themselves on them for a while. hell, i got laid off from Capital One (one of about 250 employees), had zero income, 800 dollar rent, and a car note, a child, and my unemployment was under a thousand a month. and guess what? i didnt qualify.

You'd have probably qualified for TANF. I looked over the requirements, they must have determined that you had sufficient resources to not require food stamps. From the literature I found, $2,000 in "household resources" or above cuts you out of TANF/food stamps.

not everyone can just up and find a job that pays more, or sometimes find a job at all. had i recieved them, (and only because of my child did i even go there...) i would have used them until a new job came along. i would have used them for what they were meant to do!

Food stamps were meant to keep people from starving. Apparently, you nor your child starved.

its not the people, its the system. it needs to be monitored more. i'm sorry, but there needs to be a system that handles things, like having a time limit for being on it, and maybe other programs that give out the actual food, not just the means to go get whatever you want...the ones who need it cant get it, the ones who dont need it, have it.

Well, those sorts of things sort of exist. There are tricks, however, to reset the clock. TANF, I believe has a three year limit if you have less than a HS education and less than 6 months of work experience, only one of course if you're college educated. A lot of people fill out applications and occasionally take jobs at places only to quit and have their clocks reset.

Welfare should be a hand up, not a way of life as it has become for so many.